Return to the wild

The destruction of wilderness not only dooms vulnerable species to extinction, it impoverishes humans too.

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Amita Baviskar

New Delhi August 11, 2018

ISSUE DATE: August 20, 2018

UPDATED: August 14, 2018 17:15 IST

The flickering flames of hope -- a Mendha Lekha in Maharashtra, a Timbaktu Collective in Andhra Pradesh, villagers in Nagaland who now protect migrating Amur falcons -- are too small and scattered to starve an ecological conflagration of oxygen. (Illustration by Tanmoy Chakraborty)

The Biligiri Rangana (BR) Hills in southeastern Karnataka lie where the Western and Eastern Ghats meet. This is where wildlife from one ecosystem mixes with another, creating a unique biological bridge that allows gene flow between otherwise distinct populations. Elephants and tigers and humans travel through this storied landscape. So do birds, insects, reptiles and amphibians. Along with the wind, these creatures carry pollen and seeds. Each fleeting visit to a flower or fruit, each casual dropping of dung, keeps this great forest alive and evolving.

But, unwittingly, the birds and macaques have ferried seeds that spell the death of this forest. Lantana camara, an ornamental shrub introduced from the American tropics, has so successfully lured pollinators and seed-spreaders with its pretty flowers and purple fruit that it has out-competed plants in the forest under-storey. Lantana surges so high in the BR Hills that it can hide a full-grown tusker. Its thickets so densely darken the forest floor that young tree seedlings do not live to see the light of day. From a distance, the BR Hills seem canopied with towering trees. Come closer and you find that there are no young recruits to their majestic ranks. A few decades more and this once-splendid forest will be dead.

This sorry future is not unique to the BR Hills. Lantana is but one of the ways in which we have degraded, domesticated and decimated wildness. Across the world, wild places have been violated by highways, dams and other mega projects, while plantations and farms have inflicted death by a thousand cuts. Almost all the forest clearing in Brazils Amazonia -- an incredible 95 per cent -- has occurred within 5.5 kilometres of a road. Even the remotest places aren't pristine: currents of our consumerism have created a 1.6 million square kilometres swirling garbage patch of plastic, chemical sludge and man-made debris in the north Pacific Ocean. In India, natural forests have been culled to cultivate commercially important trees. Wild rivers have been diverted and dammed, denied their floodplain, rewarded with filth. Labelling the dry savannah that shelters the Great Indian Bustard as wasteland, and then developing it by adding irrigation, roads and alien plants, has irrevocably altered an intricate and delicately poised ecosystem. Even wildlife within our national parks and wildlife sanctuaries, cordoned off from the surrounding countryside and patrolled by gun-toting guards, is not safe from mega projects, roads, invasive species and other intrusions.

Is it wildly romantic to ask for freedom for nature? Is it foolish to demand respect for the rights of other species? The answer depends on which species, where, and at whose cost. Can we imagine a world in which all species -- from Anopheles mosquitoes to the Zika virus and everything in between, hump-backed whales and honey bees -- have a place? Instead of applying blunt hammer-headed tactics to handling nature, can we work with its rhythms as some communities have done and continue to do? Can we do it in a way that doesn't deprive proximate populations of their right to a full and dignified life? Instead of passing the conservation buck on to others, can we curtail our own consumption? Can we reform the economic and political systems that foster the death of nature?

Our track record so far has been overwhelmingly appalling. The flickering flames of hope -- a Mendha Lekha in Maharashtra, a Timbaktu Collective in Andhra Pradesh, villagers in Nagaland who now protect migrating Amur falcons -- are too small and scattered to starve an ecological conflagration of oxygen. In the age of the Anthropocene, we are failing the fight for natures freedom.

Nature is resilient. It survives in some form or another. But the hardy ruderals that colonise roadsides, or the pigeons and kites that thrive in the city, are no substitute for complex ecological webs. India's forests, grasslands and wetlands, hot and cold deserts, mountains, rivers and coastlines harbour tens of thousands of plants and animals, species specially evolved to fit only that particular niche, to live within only those precise biophysical parameters. The destruction of wilderness not only dooms these vulnerable beings to extinction, it impoverishes us humans.

No man is an island,

Any mans death diminishes me,

because I am involved in mankind.

Change man to living being and mankind to the web of life and John Donne's words ring truer still. Freedom -- this-worldly, real-life freedom -- does not lie in the absence of constraints. It means recognising our dependence on others who are different from ourselves. Respecting their right to be. And working for their freedom too. And if these fairer, more just, relations embrace not only humans but also other forms of life, whether obscure or spectacular, our spirit might yet soar free.

(Amita Baviskar is Professor of Sociology at the Institute of Economic Growth, Delhi)

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